Ebooks, Word Count, and Marketing the Stand-Alone Novel (or should one book become two?)

I’ve always preferred to read and write novel-length fiction, but the ebook has brought back the short story, the novella, and the serial (among other things), story formats that were never that practical outside of magazines (and even then, it had been a while since you saw many novellas and serials). Space was always a consideration, with certain page counts being more feasible (financially speaking) than others.

With ebooks, it doesn’t cost any more to deliver a 200,000-word epic novel than it does a 10,000-word short story. Oh, sure, editing will be pricier on the bigger tale, assuming you hire outside eyes for that task, but that’s a one-time cost. Authors now have the ability to write in whatever story format they prefer and even get creative with how novels are crafted and delivered.

And more than writing preferences may come into play. As independent authors, we’re responsible for our own marketing and for figuring out the best ways to satisfy the reader and make a fair wage from our work (a living wage, if we’re lucky).

For example, the single novel can be a hard sell. My experience with multi-book formats suggests it’s easier to market and sell a series because you can play around with free or 99-cent “loss leaders” while leaving later tomes at full price. Right now, there are a lot of venues that like to advertise bargain books, which works perfectly for those of us with a series and an inexpensive Book 1.

If all you have is a single novel, you can put it on sale and try to gain traction with advertising, but even if a reader enjoys it, there’s nowhere to go from there. Oh, you might have other unrelated ebooks out, but jumping to a new world and/or new characters isn’t, for most readers, as automatic as buying the second book in a series.

So, what do you do with that single stand-alone novel? If the stars align right and the tides are favorable (AKA if it’s a big enough book), should it perhaps become two?

This is what I’m mulling over with my current project (working title: Republic). For those who have followed along with my Emperor’s Edge novels, this idea might sound familiar. Last summer, the sixth and final book in my six-book series turned into Forged in Blood I & Forged in Blood II (making it a seven book series, I suppose). Even being broken apart, those books were as long or longer than the rest of the novels in the series, so I thought it made sense.

Now I’m working on a transition novel that can either provide more closure for the EE series or work as a launching point into a new series (we’ll see how the reception is). From the beginning, I had only envisioned it as one book, but at the same time, I knew it was going to be a big one, because it has six point-of-view characters. I guessed it would be around 150,000 words when I got started. Well, I’m at 160,000 now and I have the big end battle yet to write, along with a long (and I hope fun) epilogue that I’ve had in mind from the beginning. I’m beginning to think Republic will be 200,000 words by the time I’m done.

For comparison, a new fantasy novelist is encouraged to submit novels between 80,000-100,000 words to agents. The first Emperor’s Edge book is around 105,000 words.

There’s this thing about epic fantasy though… it likes to be big. I’m not sure what the word counts are on those Jordan or Martin books, but they call them Chihuahua killers for a reason (fortunately with ebooks, you don’t need to worry about dropping super thick tomes on small dogs). Many fantasy readers enjoy these big meaty books, so I’m hoping I won’t get too many complaints about length. (People might not dig the new storyline or the departure from two POV characters to six, but that’s a different concern.)

So, what’s the problem?

There’s not really, aside from the fact that I’ll be spending a lot more time on a novel I can’t necessarily charge a lot more for, but I am wondering if turning this into two books might offer some opportunities from a marketing perspective. I never bother advertising Books 2-7 in the EE series, because I assume nobody’s going to jump into the middle without having read the first book. That means EE1 has been through BookBub and many of the other big sites that offer sponsorships multiple times already. In short, it’s old news.

With Republic, even though it has most of the characters from the EE series (along with Tikaya and Rias from the Encrypted/Decrypted books), it’s a spot where someone new might be able to jump in without being lost. Or at least not so lost that they couldn’t enjoy the story (maybe new readers would even want to later pick up the earlier books to catch up and get all the inside jokes).

I’m already planning to do something completely different with the cover art (illustrated), so it’ll feel like the start of something new. And I think the blurb might sound appealing to those who specifically seek out epic fantasy (I’ve never described my stuff as epic fantasy, but with the political emphasis in this one and the multiple story lines, it feels closer to it than many of my others). Also, the first chapter, which people might download as a sample, starts off with Amaranthe and Sicarius getting out of a little trouble on a tropical island before being called back home by the president, is on the fun and entertaining side, and I could see it drawing new folks in.

But, if I keep this as one big book, I’m not going to be particularly interested in bargain pricing it (hey, this puppy represents a lot of hours!), so I wouldn’t be able to advertise it on the big book sites, and I don’t know how many new people would try it at full price. (Since I usually price based on word count, I expect I would go around $6.95 for the ebook on this one.)

If I turn it into a duology, I can have more room to play around with pricing. I can essentially charge the same amount but make the first book less expensive, maybe $2.99 for the first part and $3.99 for the second, with a launch/sale price of 99-cent sales on the first. The downside is I would doubtlessly get new readers who didn’t like part 1 enough to buy part 2, but those are people who probably wouldn’t have plunked down $7 for an ebook from an author they hadn’t tried anyway. As far as regular readers, they might find the lower prices more appealing as well. Even if it’s technically the same $7 either way, folks are used to paying $5 from me, not $7, so that might be a bit of a balk. This way they could pick up the first part now and grab the second later. Like FiB1 & 2, it would end up feeling more like two books rather than one big expensive book.

At this point, I’m just tossing ideas around. I haven’t finished the novel, and I haven’t gone back to see if/where there might be a logical breaking point if I were to divide it. If you, as a reader or author, have an opinion on all this mulling, I would love to hear it.

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